Female academics in South Africa have always trailed their male counterparts when it comes to research and publishing. This gap persists today, despite a continuing increase in the number of women academics in the country.
On top of this, Covid-19 has drastically changed the way the world works, and seemingly exacerbated certain gender-related challenges and gaps, both in the corporate sphere, and in academia.
Given that for academics, research and publication are critical aspects of performance evaluation and career progression, it’s important to understand and work to address this gender disparity in research and publication output if we want to create an equitable academic environment. One of the ways we might consider doing this is by providing better support to early-career mothers in academia.
Drawing on personal experiences
When the government instituted Covid-19 lockdowns in South Africa, normal life ground to a halt for everyone. As work moved online and most physical spaces, such as offices, schools and shopping centres, were closed, we all grappled not only with fear and uncertainty, but with trying to navigate this “new world”. As a mother to young children, like many others, I found myself not only having to try to adapt to managing my work remotely, but also taking care of home-schooling and childcare, 24 hours a day. I found that I was often only able to get to my work in the evenings, once my children were in bed. And that was my routine work – not maintaining the required research and publishing outputs.
As I tried to figure out how I was going to manage my caring responsibilities, as well as my career ones, I began Googling to see what others in similar positions were doing. I was struck by the fact that globally, women, and especially early-career mothers, seemed to be hardest hit by the effects of the pandemic in terms of remote working.
In one 2020 study, Alessandra Minello, Sara Martucci and Lidia KC Manzo aimed to identify the challenges academic mothers faced working remotely with children present, and describe the perceived effects of the pandemic on their future career. The results showed that the pandemic changed the priorities of academic mothers in a direction unfavourable to their careers: mothers devoted most of their time to teaching duties and stopped research. Moreover, they felt an increased gap in their relative competitiveness with male and childless colleagues.
Similar studies in Japan and Germany (Yamamura & Tsustsui, 2021; Möhring et al., 2021) found that Covid-19 increased the burden of childcare, especially for mothers caring for children in primary school.
In an article they describe as “a feminist, heartful, autoethnographic account”, two academic mothers, Batsheva Guy and Brittany Arthur, recount their experiences working from home and raising children during the pandemic. They touch on everything from the realities of working from home meaning a lower productivity rate for academic mothers in particular, to the mental health challenges wrought by isolation and the trauma of the pandemic, detailing the increased burden they felt.
“Moving forward, it is clear that our society needs to do a better collective job being more mindful and realistic of its expectations of working mothers,” they write.
From the literature, it became evident that childcare slows the productivity of early-career mothers when working remotely. However, accessing additional childcare support also comes at a high cost, making it difficult for early-career mothers to afford.
As early-career academic mothers remain disproportionately responsible for childcare and family responsibilities, they are at a disadvantaged position to fulfil their work duties and achieve their workload, compared with men and non-mothers at equivalent stages of their career.
This echoed my own experiences, and so I began to look at solutions proposed and to consider what might assist women in my position to compete academically, even while working remotely, or, as the pandemic lockdowns eased, in a hybrid situation.
Developing sustainable solutions
Guy and Arthur detail a range of coping mechanisms they applied as individuals to help them manage their family and work obligations, which included:
- Creating spaces to connect with others. The authors developed a group chat with colleagues where they could brainstorm ideas and provide support for one another. They later added check-in meetings and virtual lunches to intentionally carve out time for connection.
- Communicating needs to family members. For example, one of the writers is an introvert and had to learn to be honest with her partner about needing some alone time every day to recharge – whether doing laps in the garden after putting her son to bed or taking a 10-minute nap.
- Making the most of small chunks of time. In a remote or hybrid working model, where work time may be punctuated by meeting children’s needs, it may not be possible to work uninterrupted for several hours at a time. The authors found it helpful to use even the 15-minute slots they had available, as cumulatively these do build towards one’s objectives.
While these may be helpful measures, the truth is that to build a level playing field for early-career academic mothers, more must be done by their employers – academic institutions – to support them.
Solutions can be short-, medium- or long-term, and might include:
- Providing teaching support. For early-career academic mothers to have the capacity to focus on research, they may need to spend less time teaching or developing new course material. Institutions could support them by relaxing course development requirements or by hiring post-doctoral fellows to assist with this.
- Improving funding access. Often, research funding is scarce and those without extensive research experience struggle to compete for it against advanced researchers. Providing more funding specifically for emerging researchers could help in this respect.
- Invite participation in a broader range of research avenues. There are many ways to be involved in research – not just through undertaking it and through publication. For example, being a member of a journal’s editorial board is one way that an early-career academic could both benefit from collaborating with more experienced academics and bring a valuable, fresh perspective. Academic publications could also solicit opinions from early-career academic mothers on how they could support their increased participation. The issues that could be explored might include, for example, whether they could decrease their departmental or university service level, or whether there were incentives that could make it more appealing for them to undertake research, such as one free open-access publication in the journal per year.
- Offer multi-modality events. There are pros and cons to both in-person and virtual events. For example, virtual conferences and meetings may fast-track decision-making and cut down on travel time. However, these practices take away the human interaction from colleagues, reducing networking and relationship-building opportunities. Offering hybrid options allows attendees, particularly early-career mothers, flexibility in assessing which modality may be most beneficial at that point. For example, they may be able to dial into conferences sessions that they could not otherwise attend due to childcare responsibilities, or to choose to attend in person to have the opportunity to meet and engage with people involved specifically within their research fields, boosting opportunity for collaboration.
- Flexible working hours. Although remote and hybrid working are meant to have yielded more flexibility in terms of working hours, the truth is that many academic institutions have not fully embraced this flexibility, still expecting employees to work traditional office hours. These are often at odds with family and childcare commitments. Flexibility in scheduling would ensure early-career mothers are able to mould their working rhythms around childcare, thus maximising their ability to be productive.
Mapping a way forward
The challenges facing early-career mothers in academia can be addressed, but these mothers cannot do it alone. They need support from their respective academic institutions. Importantly, this requires commitment to testing and room for failure. I would urge the various stakeholders in academia not to waive solutions that have been tested and failed at first attempt, but to seek to understand why and how to better them for a following attempt.
Though remote and hybrid working have advantages for both companies and employees, the challenges of these working models for early-career mothers in academia should not be ignored.
Dr Motshedisi (Tshidi) Mathibe is a full-time faculty member at the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS). Her research interests are in the field of social entrepreneurship, women entrepreneurship, informal sector, township economy, and base of the pyramid markets. In addition to teaching and research responsibilities, Tshidi is involved with the United Nations' Global Compact Young Sustainable Development Goals Innovators Programme.
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